The rear panel of my five window cab was beyond saving and I was left with the option of either getting a another new cab or replacing the rear panel from under the belt line to the bottom and from door jam to door jam. To me this was a very daunting challenge.
I read everything I could to find someone who had performed this surgery but came up empty. So it has turned out to be another of those trail blazing events in the resurrection of this 54 half ton.
I had the old original three window cab that was too far gone to save and removed the rear panel from it by drilling out all the spot welds and then using a cut off wheel on my grinder, slicing the lower belt line seam from ear to ear.
The panel then came off rather easily and went into safe storage while I took the next step which was removing the old panel from the five window.
Basically it was the same procedure but instead of cutting right at the belt line I cut about a half inch south of it. I then bought some 1/2 x 1/8 strip metal at Home Depot and welded this on the underside of the remaining belt line lip to serve as a backing strip.
I then laid the new rear panel in place and marked the top edge to match up with the backing plate strip. Once I had trimmed everything to fit as well as I could I then tacked the new panel in place starting from the middle of the top seam and then the bottom.
It appears that everything is in the right place and I will be welding it out once I get a new bottle of shielding gas for the MIG.
For me this marks a major progress point in the body work but I still have the outer cab corners to install.
I hope to get Joker or another bolter to post a couple of my pics of this process in this thread so others can see how this was done. It will be next week before I can finish out the welding and grinding but I am now another step closer to the road with "Patches".
